Audacity 1.3.2 beta is hogging all my RAM on a simple import

[David Fox]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 5:55 AM, David Fox <dfox94085 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Steve Flynn <anothermindbomb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Do you get the same issue when using a stable version of Audacity,
>> rather than a beta?
>
> Well, it's called a beta, but it's the default version that is in Hardy

Further - earlier this evening I created a swap file on another
partition, about 4.2 gigs, and attached the swap. audacity was able to
load the entire mp3 file and permit some editing (my suspicion was
that there was duplicate material in the mp3 that I wished to remove)
and then save the file back out to disk (it's in the process of saving
now).

The data produced by the mp3 is abour 4 gigs worth of .au files - so I
figure that's the bottleneck right there - audacity is trying to keep
all the audio data in memory, even though edits might only be done on
a small portion of the file. This is different behavior I think than
what I was experiencing before (on a smaller platform, and somewhat
smaller source audio - in that case it was CD sized files, more or
less).

I tried converting stereo to mono (after all, it's a talk radio
recording) to save time and space, but that broke, got a segmentation
fault 13 minutes later for my trouble.

And guess what - despite telling audacity to use $home as a temporary
folder, it still tries to write the exported file to /tmp. Which got
full - and another wasted effort. I'll just leave the file as is for
now.